A top scientist has proposed a new way to reconcile the two different ways that our clocks keep time. Meet -- wait for it -- the leap minute. From a report: Later this month, delegations from around the world will head to a conference in Dubai to discuss international treaties involving radio frequencies, satellite coordination and other tricky technical issues. These include the nagging problem of the clocks. For 50 years, the international community has carefully and precariously balanced two different ways of keeping time. One method, based on Earth's rotation, is as old as human timekeeping itself, an ancient and common-sense reliance on the position of the sun and stars. The other, more precise method coaxes a steady, reliable frequency from the changing state of cesium atoms and provides essential regularity for the digital devices that dominate our lives.

The trouble is that the times on these clocks diverge. The astronomical time, called Universal Time, or UT1, has tended to fall a few clicks behind the atomic one, called International Atomic Time, or TAI. So every few years since 1972, the two times have been synced by the insertion of leap seconds -- pausing the atomic clocks briefly to let the astronomic one catch up. This creates UTC, Universal Coordinated Time. But it's hard to forecast precisely when the leap second will be required, and this has created an intensifying headache for technology companies, countries and the world's timekeepers.

"Having to deal with leap seconds drives me crazy," said Judah Levine, head of the Network Synchronization Project in the Time and Frequency Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., where he is a leading thinker on coordinating the world's clocks. He is constantly badgered for updates and better solutions, he said: "I get a bazillion emails." On the eve of the next international discussion, Dr. Levine has written a paper that proposes a new solution: the leap minute. The idea is to sync the clocks less frequently, perhaps every half-century, essentially letting atomic time diverge from cosmos-based time for 60 seconds or even a tad longer, and basically forgetting about it in the meantime.

Around 66 million years ago, the Chicxulub asteroid caused a mass extinction event, killing three-quarters of life on Earth, including the dinosaurs. A new study suggests that fine silicate dust from the asteroid, which remained in the atmosphere for up to 15 years, played a more significant role in causing the impact winter and extinction than previously thought. Phys.Org reports: Fine silicate dust from pulverized rock would have stayed in the atmosphere for 15 years, dropping global temperatures by up to 15 degrees Celsius, researchers said in a study in the journal Nature Geoscience. [...] For the study, the international team of researchers was able to measure dust particles thought to be from right after the asteroid struck. The particles were found at the Tanis fossil site in the US state of North Dakota.

Though 3,000 kilometers (1,865 miles) away from the crater, the site has preserved a number of remarkable finds believed to be dated from directly after the asteroid impact in sediment layers of an ancient lake. The dust particles were around 0.8 to 8.0 -- micrometers -- just the right size to stick around in the atmosphere for up to 15 years, the researchers said.

Entering this data into climate models similar to those used for current-day Earth, the researchers determined that dust likely played a far greater role in the mass extinction than had previously been thought. Out of all the material that was shot into the atmosphere by the asteroid, they estimated that it was 75 percent dust, 24 percent sulfur and one percent soot. The dust particles "totally shut down photosynthesis" in plants for at least a year, causing a "catastrophic collapse" of life, [said Ozgur Karatekin, a researcher at the Royal Observatory of Belgium].

An anonymous reader shares a report: PFAS stands for "per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances," a family of upwards of 15,000 or more human-made and incredibly durable chemical compounds that have been used in countless industrial and consumer applications for decades. Firefighting foams, waterproof hiking boots, raincoats, nonstick frying pans, dental floss, lipstick, and even the ink used to label packaging -- all can contain PFAS. The compounds are ubiquitous in drinking water and soil, even migrating to Arctic sea ice. PFAS are called forever chemicals because once present in the environment, they do not degrade or break down. They accumulate, are transferred throughout the watershed, and ultimately persist. The quest to reduce the amount of PFAS in the environment is what led me to an industrial park in a southern suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The jar of PFAS concentrate in my hand is part of a demonstration arranged by my hosts, Revive Environmental, during a tour of the company's PFAS destruction site, one of the first in the country to operate commercially and at scale. A few yards in front of me sits the company's PFAS "Annihilator" in a white shipping container.

The Annihilator represents just one of several technologies now vying to break down and destroy PFAS. These span the gamut from established processes like electrochemical oxidation and supercritical water oxidation to emerging techniques relying on ultraviolet light, plasma, ultrasound, or catalyst-driven thermal processes. Some are deployed in field tests. Other companies are actively running pilot programs, many with various divisions of the US Department of Defense and other government agencies. And many other technologies are still undergoing laboratory research. There's good reason for this. Not only are PFAS everywhere around us; they're also in us. Humans can't break down PFAS, and our bodies struggle to clear them from our systems. Studies suggest they're in my blood and yours -- the majority of Americans,' in fact -- and they have been linked to increased risks of kidney and testicular cancer, decreased infant birthweights, and high blood pressure. And that's only what we know about now: researchers continue to grapple with the full impacts of PFAS on human and environmental health.

Efforts to curb emissions of a powerful greenhouse gas commonly produced as a by-product of refrigerant manufacture might be falling short, and it seems eastern China is a major culprit. Nature: The hydrofluorocarbon gas, HFC-23, is around 14,700 times as powerful as carbon dioxide at warming the globe and has long been the subject of national and international climate-change mitigation efforts. Those efforts gained new traction nearly a decade ago when China and India -- the world's largest producers of the chemical -- agreed to dial down its emissions. New research, however, confirms that emissions continued to rise in subsequent years, and an analysis of data from atmospheric-monitoring stations suggests that factories in eastern China are responsible for nearly half of the total.

The rogue emissions are one of several air-pollution sources under discussion at the latest meeting of the Montreal Protocol, held in Nairobi, Kenya, this week. Signed in 1987, the Montreal Protocol is generally considered the most effective international environmental treaty in history, having halted the destruction of the ozone layer while also slowing down global warming. But scientists have often played a role, scanning the atmosphere for chemicals, such as ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), that governments have agreed to phase out. "Science has been instrumental in evaluating compliance under the treaty," says Megan Lickley, a climate scientist at Georgetown University in Washington DC.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It was always abundantly clear that the leader of the Russian space corporation Roscosmos from 2018 to 2022, Dmitry Rogozin, sought to kowtow to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now we have an anecdote from Putin himself that highlights how much. The story concerns a satellite constellation now known as Sfera (or Sphere, in English), a modestly ambitious constellation of 264 satellites. The Sphere constellation is intended to provide broadband Internet service from middle-Earth orbit to Russia as well as high-resolution Earth observation satellites.

As is usual with Russian space projects, because they tend to be poorly funded, the timeline for Sphere's deployment has been delayed and its scope reduced. It also underwent an unscheduled name change. Prior to 2018, this satellite program was known as Ehfir (Ether), a reference to the invisible substance once thought to fill the universe and the medium through which light waves propagated.

However that changed in 2018 when Putin was publicly announcing the program's creation. He recently recalled this in remarks that were recorded by RIA Novosti's Telegram channel. They were translated for Ars by Rob Mitchell. "At first it was called Ehfir," Putin said. "And at one of my public speeches I was talking and said it was Sfera. I arrived at the Kremlin, and the former Roscosmos head greeted me and said, 'Vladimirovich, you said it was project Sfera, Sfera you said. That's what it is, project Sfera.'"

Rogozin, who was listening to these remarks, acted immediately -- presumably to save his boss from embarrassment. After Rogozin said the constellation was named Sphere, Putin recalled that he asked how's that? Rogozin replied that it had already been renamed Sfera, not to worry. Laughing, Putin added, "So I didn't even make it back and it's already renamed to Sfera. So I said, well, OK then." Rogozin confirmed the anecdote on his Telegram channel this week.

The UK's oil and gas regulator is coming under fire from environmental groups for using lawyers to try to prevent the publication of five key documents relating to the environmental impact of Shell's activities in the North Sea. From a report: At a hearing in December, a legal representative for the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) is expected to argue against the publication of documents that contain details about the risk of pollution as a result of decommissioning the Brent oilfield, which was operated by Shell for more than 40 years. It says it opposes publication "on a matter of process basis." Shell has applied for an exemption from international rules that require all infrastructure to be removed from the field and the UK government is deciding whether it will allow the oil company to leave the 170-metre-high oil platform legs in place for the three platforms known as Bravo, Charlie and Delta.

A total of 64 concrete storage cells are contained in the leg structures, 42 of which have previously been used for oil storage and separation. Most of the cells are the size of seven Olympic swimming pools, and collectively still contain an estimated 72,000 tonnes of contaminated sediment and 638,000 cubic metres of oily water. Environmental groups believe the documents held by the NSTA would reveal new information about long-term environmental dangers that is relevant to other North Sea oil developments, including Equinor's plans to develop Rosebank, the UK's largest untapped field.

Alexandra Witze reports via Nature: A meteorite that slammed into Mars in September 2021 has rewritten what scientists know about the planet's interior. By analysing the seismic energy that vibrated through the planet after the impact, researchers have discovered a layer of molten rock that envelops Mars's liquid-metal core. The finding, reported today in two papers in Nature, means that the Martian core is smaller than previously thought. It also resolves some lingering questions about how the red planet formed and evolved over billions of years.

The discovery comes from NASA's InSight mission, which landed a craft with a seismometer on Mars's surface. Between 2018 and 2022, that instrument detected hundreds of "marsquakes' shaking the planet. In July 2021, on the basis of the mission's observations of 11 quakes, researchers reported that the liquid core of Mars seemed to have a radius of around 1,830 kilometers3. That was bigger than many scientists were expecting. And it suggested that the core contained surprisingly high amounts of light chemical elements, such as sulfur, mixed with iron. But the September 2021 meteorite impact "unlocked everything," says Henri Samuel, a geophysicist at the Institute of Earth Physics of Paris and lead author of one of today's papers1. The meteorite struck the planet on the side opposite to where InSight was located. That's much more distant than the marsquakes that InSight had previously studied, and allowed the probe to detect seismic energy traveling all the way through the Martian core4. "We were so excited," says Jessica Irving, a seismologist at the University of Bristol, UK, and a co-author of Samuel's paper.

For Samuel, it was an opportunity to test his idea that a molten layer of rock surrounds Mars's core5. The way the seismic energy traversed the planet showed that what scientists had thought was the boundary between the liquid core and the solid mantle, 1,830 kilometers from the planet's centre, was actually a different boundary between liquid and solid. It was the top of the newfound layer of molten rock meeting the mantle (see 'Rethinking the Martian core'). The actual core is buried beneath that molten-rock layer and has a radius of only 1,650 kilometers, Samuel says. The revised core size solves some puzzles. It means that the Martian core doesn't have to contain high amounts of light elements -- a better match to laboratory and theoretical estimates. A second liquid layer inside the planet also meshes better with other evidence, such as how Mars responds to being deformed by the gravitational tug of its moon Phobos.

The second paper in Nature today2, from a team independent of Samuel's, agrees that Mars's core is enveloped by a layer of molten rock, but estimates that the core has a radius of 1,675 kilometers. The work analyzed seismic waves from the same distant meteorite impact, as well as simulations of the properties of mixtures of molten elements such as iron, nickel and sulfur at the high pressures and temperatures in the Martian core. Having molten rock right up against molten iron "appears to be unique," says lead author Amir Khan, a geophysicist at ETH Zurich. "You have this peculiarity of liquid-liquid layering, which is something that doesn't exist on the Earth." The molten-rock layer might be left over from a magma ocean that once covered Mars. As it cooled and solidified into rock, the magma would have left behind a deep layer of radioactive elements that still release heat and keep rock molten at the base of the mantle, Samuel says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Egbert Edelbroek was acting as a sperm donor when he first wondered whether it's possible to have babies in space. Curious about the various ways that donated sperm can be used, Edelbroek, a Dutch entrepreneur, began to speculate on whether in vitro fertilization technology was possible beyond Earth -- or could even be improved by the conditions found there. Could the weightlessness of space be better than a flat laboratory petri dish? Now Edelbroek is CEO of SpaceBorn United, a biotech startup seeking to pioneer the study of human reproduction away from Earth. Next year, he plans to send a mini lab on a rocket into low Earth orbit, where in vitro fertilization, or IVF, will take place. If it succeeds, Edelbroek hopes his work could pave the way for future space settlements.

"Humanity needs a backup plan," he says. "If you want to be a sustainable species, you want to be a multiplanetary species." Beyond future space colonies, there is also a more pressing need to understand the effects of space on the human reproductive system. No one has ever become pregnant in space -- yet. But with the rise of space tourism, it's likely that it will eventually happen one day. Edelbroek thinks we should be prepared. Despite the burgeoning interest in deep space exploration and settlement, prompted in part by billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, we still know very little about what happens to our reproductive biology when we're in orbit. A report released in September by the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine points out that almost no research has been done on human reproduction in space, adding that our understanding of how space affects reproduction is "vital to long-term space exploration, but largely unexplored to date."

Some studies on animals have suggested that the various stages of reproduction -- from mating and fertilization to embryo development, implantation, pregnancy, and birth -- can function normally in space. For example, in the very first such experiment, eight Japanese medaka fish developed from egg to hatchling aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 1994. All eight survived the return to Earth and seemed to behave normally.Yet other studies have found evidence that points to potential problems. Pregnant rats that spent much of their third trimester -- a total of five days -- on a Soviet satellite in 1983 experienced complications during labor and delivery. Like all astronauts returning to Earth, the rats were exhausted and weak. Their deliveries lasted longer than usual, likely because of atrophied uterine muscles. All the pups in one of the litters died during delivery, the result of an obstruction thought to be due in part to the mother's weakened state.

To Edelbroek, these inconclusive results point to a need to systematically isolate each step in the reproductive process in order to better understand how it is affected by conditions like lower gravity and higher radiation exposure. The mini lab his company developed is designed to do exactly that. It is about the size of a shoebox and uses microfluidics to connect a chamber containing sperm to a chamber containing an egg. It can also rotate at different speeds to replicate the gravitational environment of Earth, the moon, or Mars. It is small enough to fit inside a capsule that can be housed on top of a rocket and launched into space.After the egg has been fertilized in the device, it splits into two cells, each of which divides again to form four cells and so on. After five to six days, the embryo reaches a stage known as a blastocyst, which looks like a hollow ball. At this point, the embryos in the mini lab will be cryogenically frozen for their return to Earth.

NASA is demonstrating laser communications on multiple missions -- showcasing the benefits infrared light can have for science and exploration missions transmitting terabytes of important data. NASA: The International Space Station is getting a "flashy" technology demonstration this November. The ILLUMA-T (Integrated Laser Communications Relay Demonstration Low Earth Orbit User Modem and Amplifier Terminal) payload is launching to the International Space Station to demonstrate how missions in low Earth orbit can benefit from laser communications. Laser communications uses invisible infrared light to send and receive information at higher data rates, providing spacecraft with the capability to send more data back to Earth in a single transmission and expediting discoveries for researchers.

Managed by NASA's Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program, ILLUMA-T is completing NASA's first bi-directional, end-to-end laser communications relay by working with the agency's LCRD (Laser Communications Relay Demonstration). LCRD launched in December 2021 and is currently demonstrating the benefits of laser communications from geosynchronous orbit by transmitting data between two ground stations on Earth in a series of experiments. Some of LCRD's experiments include studying atmospheric impact on laser signals, confirming LCRD's ability to work with multiple users, testing network capabilities like delay/disruption tolerant networking (DTN) over laser links, and investigating improved navigation capabilities.

Demand for climate-warming fuels like coal, oil and natural gas will likely peak before 2030, evidence of the accelerating global shift to energy that doesn't emit greenhouse gasses, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA)'s World Energy Outlook. From a report: "The transition to clean energy is happening worldwide and it's unstoppable. It's not a question of 'if', it's just a matter of 'how soon' -- and the sooner the better for all of us," said Fatih Birol, IEA executive director, in a statement. The agency represents countries that make up more than 80% of global energy consumption. The annual IEA report estimates that in 2030 there will be 10 times as many electric vehicles on the road worldwide and 50% of the cars sold in the United States will be electric. The agency says solar panels installed across the globe will generate more electricity at the end of the decade than the U.S. power system produces now. And the report projects that renewable energy will supply 50% of the world's electricity needs, up from about 30% now.

But the report warns the pace of the transition will have to quicken considerably in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, and avoid some of the worst case scenarios in a changing climate. The IEA's outlook lays out a strategy for meeting that goal that includes tripling renewable energy, doubling energy efficiency measures and slashing methane emissions from fossil fuel operations by 75% by 2030. Methane has more than 25 times the climate-warming potential of carbon dioxide, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Climate and anti-fossil fuel groups say the IEA's methane strategy should be even more aggressive.

Companies including Nestle, Unilever, Mahindra Group and Volvo Cars are urging political leaders to agree a timeline at the upcoming U.N. climate summit to phase out fossil fuels. From a report: The 131 companies, which have nearly $1 trillion in global annual revenues, wrote in a letter published on Monday that attendees at the COP28 summit must commit to reach 100% decarbonised power systems by 2035 for richer economies, and help developing countries financially so they can ditch fossil fuels by 2040 at the latest. "Our businesses are feeling the impacts and cost of increasing extreme weather events resulting from climate change," the companies wrote in the letter, which was coordinated by the non-profit We Mean Business Coalition, which is pushing for greater climate action globally.

"To decarbonise the global energy system, we need to ramp up clean energy as fast as we phase out the use and production of fossil fuels," they wrote. The letter's 131 signatories, which include Bayer, Heineken, IKEA and Iberdrola, span a range of sectors and include multinationals and small and medium-sized businesses. Companies are increasingly committing to their own timelines for reducing their emissions, but many acknowledge that their ability to slow planet-warming CO2 emissions is contingent on faster action from governments.

Accelerated ice melt in west Antarctica is inevitable for the rest of the century no matter how much carbon emissions are cut, research indicates. The implications for sea level rise are "dire," scientists say, and mean some coastal cities may have to be abandoned. From a report: The ice sheet of west Antarctica would push up the oceans by 5 metres if lost completely. Previous studies have suggested it is doomed to collapse over the course of centuries, but the new study shows that even drastic emissions cuts in the coming decades will not slow the melting. The analysis shows the rate of melting of the floating ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea will be three times faster this century compared with the previous century, even if the world meets the most ambitious Paris agreement target of keeping global heating below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

Losing the floating ice shelves means the glacial ice sheets on land are freed to slide more rapidly into the ocean. Many millions of people live in coastal cities that are vulnerable to sea level rise, from New York to Mumbai to Shanghai, and more than a third of the global population lives within 62 miles (100km) of the coast. The climate crisis is driving sea level rise by the melting of ice sheets and glaciers and the thermal expansion of sea water. The biggest uncertainty in future sea level rise is what will happen in Antarctica, the scientists say, making planning to adapt to the rise very hard. Researchers said translation of the new findings on ice melting into specific estimates of sea level rise was urgently needed.

"It's not every day that you get to update the firmware on a device that was produced in the 1970s," writes Hackaday, "and rarely is said device well beyond the boundaries of our solar system.

"This is however exactly what the JPL team in charge of the Voyager 1 & 2 missions are facing, as they are in the process of sending fresh firmware patches over to these amazing feats of engineering."

From NASA's announcement: One effort addresses fuel residue that seems to be accumulating inside narrow tubes in some of the thrusters on the spacecraft. The thrusters are used to keep each spacecraft's antenna pointed at Earth. This type of buildup has been observed in a handful of other spacecraft... In some of the propellant inlet tubes, the buildup is becoming significant. To slow that buildup, the mission has begun letting the two spacecraft rotate slightly farther in each direction [almost 1 degree] before firing the thrusters. This will reduce the frequency of thruster firings... While more rotating by the spacecraft could mean bits of science data are occasionally lost — akin to being on a phone call where the person on the other end cuts out occasionally — the team concluded the plan will enable the Voyagers to return more data over time.

Engineers can't know for sure when the thruster propellant inlet tubes will become completely clogged, but they expect that with these precautions, that won't happen for at least five more years, possibly much longer. "This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don't have a playbook," said Linda Spilker, project scientist for the mission as NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "But they continue to come up with creative solutions."
But that's not the only issue: The team is also uploading a software patch to prevent the recurrence of a glitch that arose on Voyager 1 last year. Engineers resolved the glitch, and the patch is intended to prevent the issue from occurring again in Voyager 1 or arising in its twin, Voyager 2...

In 2022, the onboard computer that orients the Voyager 1 spacecraft with Earth began to send back garbled status reports, despite otherwise continuing to operate normally... The attitude articulation and control system (AACS) was misdirecting commands, writing them into the computer memory instead of carrying them out. One of those missed commands wound up garbling the AACS status report before it could reach engineers on the ground.

The team determined the AACS had entered into an incorrect mode; however, they couldn't determine the cause and thus aren't sure if the issue could arise again. The software patch should prevent that.

"This patch is like an insurance policy that will protect us in the future and help us keep these probes going as long as possible," said JPL's Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager. "These are the only spacecraft to ever operate in interstellar space, so the data they're sending back is uniquely valuable to our understanding of our local universe."
Since their launch in 1977, NASA's two Voyager probes have travelled more than 12 billion miles (each!), and are still sending back data from beyond our solar system.

"No roof, no solar power. That has been the dispiriting equation shutting out roughly half of all Americans from plugging into the sun," writes the Washington Post's "Climate Coach" column.

"But signing up for solar soon might be as easy as subscribing to Netflix." Scores of new small solar farms that sell clean, local electricity directly to customers are popping up. The setup, dubbed "community solar," is designed to bring solar power to people who don't own their own homes or can't install panels — often at prices below retail electricity rates...

At least 22 states have passed legislation encouraging independent community solar projects, but developers are just beginning to expand. Most existing projects are booked. At the moment, community solar projects in the United States generate enough electricity to power about 918,000 homes — less than 1 percent of total households, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, a nonprofit trade group. But as more states join, and the Environmental Protection Agency's "Solar for All" program pours billions into federal solar power grants, more Americans will get the chance...

While projects exist in most states, they are highly concentrated: More than half are in Massachusetts, Minnesota and New York. These might be on a condo roof, or on open land like the 10-MW Fresno community solar farm, on a city-owned plot surrounded by agricultural land. Most are small: 2 megawatts of capacity on average, about enough to power 200 to 400 homes... The renewable energy marketplace EnergySage and the nonprofit Solar United Neighbors connect customers to community solar projects in their region. People generally receive monthly credits for electricity produced by their share of solar panels. These are subtracted from their total electricity bill or credited on future bills... Subscribers on average save about 10 percent on their utility bill (the range is 5 percent to 15 percent).

These economics are propelling the industry to record heights. Between 2016 and 2019, community solar capacity more than quadrupled to 1.4 gigawatts. By the end of this year, energy research firm Wood Mackenzie estimates, there will be 6 GW of community solar. And the Energy Department wants to see community solar reach 5 million households by 2025. "The economics are strongly on the side of doing this," says Dan Kammen, an energy professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "It's now cheaper to build new solar than to operate old fossil [fuel plants]. ... We're at the takeoff point."
The article notes "solar for renters" saves about $100 per year for the average ratepayer (while rooftop solar arrays may save homeowners over $1,000 annually). But according to the article, the arrangement still "reflects a new reality...

"Solar energy prices are falling as private and public money, and new laws, are fueling a massive expansion of small-scale community solar projects."

"A company backed by BlackRock has abandoned plans to build a 1,300-mile pipeline across the US Midwest to collect and store carbon emissions from the corn ethanol industry," reports Ars Technica.

The move comes "following opposition from landowners and some environmental campaigners." Navigator CO2 on Friday said developing its carbon capture and storage (CCS) project called Heartland Greenway had been "challenging" because of the unpredictable nature of regulatory and government processes in South Dakota and Iowa. Navigator's decision to scrap its flagship $3.1 billion project — one of the biggest of its kind in the US — is a blow for a fledgling industry... It also represents a setback for the carbon-intensive corn ethanol refining industry, a pillar of the rural Midwestern economy which is targeting industry-scale CCS as a way to reduce emissions...

The project faced opposition from local landowners, who expressed concerns about safety and property seizures, and some environmentalists who describe CO2 pipelines as dangerous and a way to prop up the fossil fuels industry, which already has a network of such infrastructure. Addressing the decision by Navigator, the Coalition To Stop CO2 Pipelines said it "celebrates this victory," but added: "we also know that the tax incentives made available by the federal government for carbon capture, transport and storage likely mean another entity will pick up Navigator's project, or find a different route through Illinois."
The article cites one analyst at energy research firm Wood Mackenzie who believes this cancellation could benefit rival carbon-capture companies like Summit Carbon Solutions, which is planning an even larger network of CO2 pipelines throughout the Midwest, and could try to sign deals with Navigator's former customers.

Linus Torvalds has said he bought a Dell XPS-13 with Ubuntu Linux for his daughter. Now ZDNet shares some trivia from the history of "the most well-known Linux laptop," citing a presentation by Barton George, Dell Technologies' Developer Community manager, at the Linux/open-source conference All Things Open: First, however, you should know that Dell has supported Linux desktops and laptops since the middle 2000s. In 2006, Michael Dell told me that Dell would be the first major PC vendor to release and support desktop Linux — and this proved to be a success. Barton George explained that Dell had always done great volume with these computers. Not volume, like the Windows machines, of course, but enough that Dell has always offered Linux-based — primarily Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) powered — workstations.

Still, none of these machines really appealed to developers... George announced on his personal blog what Dell was planning, and his traffic went from 60 views a day to 15,000. Then, as now, there's a lot of interest in laptops that come with Linux ready to go... Dell got together with Canonical, Ubuntu Linux's parent company, to make sure all the drivers were in place for a top-notch Ubuntu Linux developer desktop experience. Indeed, the name 'Project Sputnik' is a nod to Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu founder and Canonical CEO. A decade before the project itself, Shuttleworth had spent eight days orbiting the Earth in a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft. George and the crew decided "Soyuz" didn't have an inspiring ring to it, so the company went with "Sputnik" instead.

George continued: "We announced a beta program for the machine with a 10% off offer. We thought, well, we'll probably get 300 people. Instead, we got 6,000. This is where senior management said OK, you've got something real."

An anonymous reader shared this report from SciTechDaily: Since the 1980s, researchers have observed significant periods of unrest in a region of California's Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains characterized by swarms of earthquakes as well as the ground inflating and rising by almost half an inch per year during these periods. The activity is concerning because the area, called the Long Valley Caldera, sits atop a massive dormant supervolcano... What is behind the increased activity in the last few decades? Could it be that the area is preparing to erupt again? Or could the uptick in activity actually be a sign that the risk of a massive eruption is decreasing?

To answer these questions, Caltech researchers have created the most detailed underground images to date of the Long Valley Caldera, reaching depths up to 10 kilometers within the Earth's crust. These high-resolution images reveal the structure of the earth beneath the caldera and show that the recent seismic activity is a result of fluids and gases being released as the area cools off and settles down.

The work was conducted in the laboratory of Zhongwen Zhan (PhD '14), professor of geophysics. A paper describing the research was published on October 18 in the journal Science Advances. "We don't think the region is gearing up for another supervolcanic eruption, but the cooling process may release enough gas and liquid to cause earthquakes and small eruptions," says Zhan. "For example, in May 1980, there were four magnitude 6 earthquakes in the region alone."

Nearly two dozen species are being taken off America's endangered species list, reports CBS News, "because they are extinct, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Monday." Most of the species were listed under the Endangered Species Act in the 1970s or 1980s and were very low in numbers or likely already extinct at the time of listing. In the years since, "rigorous reviews of the best available science" have been conducted to determine whether the animals are extinct. "Federal protection came too late to reverse these species' decline, and it's a wake-up call on the importance of conserving imperiled species before it's too late," Service Director Martha Williams said. Scientists in 2019 warned that worldwide, 1 million species of plants and animals were at risk of extinction.

There are more than 1,300 species listed as either endangered or threatened in the United States under the Endangered Species Act. The 21 species being removed include one mammal, 10 types of birds, two species of fish and eight types of mussels. Eight of the 21 species were found in Hawaii.
From the agency's announcement: The 21 species extinctions highlight the importance of the Endangered Species Act and efforts to conserve species before declines become irreversible. The circumstances of each also underscore how human activity can drive species decline and extinction by contributing to habitat loss, overuse, and the introduction of invasive species and diseases...

The Endangered Species Act has been highly effective and credited with saving 99% of listed species from extinction. Thus far, more than 100 species of plants and animals have been delisted based on recovery or reclassified from endangered to threatened based on improved conservation status, and hundreds more species are stable or improving thanks to the collaborative actions of Tribes, federal agencies, state and local governments, conservation organizations and private citizens.
An official from the agency said in the announcement "The ultimate goal is to recover these species, so they no longer need the Act's protection."

Buckeye, Arizona, is eyeing 'crazy' ideas to keep growing, including piping water hundreds of miles uphill from Mexico. From a report: Arizona, stressed by years of drought, has declared its housebuilding boom will have to be curbed due to a lack of water but one of its fastest-growing cities is refusing to give up its relentless march into the desert -- even if it requires constructing a pipeline that would bring water across the border from Mexico. The population of Buckeye, located 35 miles west of Phoenix, has doubled over the past decade to just under 120,000 and it is now priming itself to eventually become one of the largest cities in the US west. The city's boundaries are vast -- covering an area stretching out into the Sonoran Desert that would encompass two New York Cities -- and so are its ambitions.

Buckeye expects to one day contain as many as 1.5 million people, rivaling or even surpassing Phoenix -- the sixth largest city in the US that uses roughly 2bn gallons of water a day -- by sprawling out the tendrils of suburbia, with its neat lawns, snaking roads and large homes, into the baking desert. Arizona's challenging water situation appears a major barrier to such hopes, however. In June, the state announced that new uses of its groundwater have essentially hit a limit, placing restrictions on house building, just a few months after the state lost a fifth of its water allocation from the ailing Colorado River.

There isn't enough water beneath Buckeye to support homes not already being built, Arizona's water department has said. But the city is embarking upon an extraordinary scramble to find water from other sources -- by recycling it, purchasing it or importing it -- to maintain the sort of hurtling growth that continues to propel the US west even in an era of climate crisis. "Personally, my view is that we are still full steam ahead," said Eric Orsborn, Buckeye's ebullient mayor. Orsborn said he understands the state has to be "really careful" with water resources but that the city is exploring "options to keep us going and allow us to continue to grow at the rate that we want to grow."

Tereza Pultarova reports via Space.com: Light pollution is a growing threat to astronomy, but a new streetlamp technology could restore clear views of the night sky. [...] A study published earlier this year found that stars are disappearing from the sky at an average rate of 10% per year. This trend affects even the world's most remote observatories. Germany-based startup StealthTransit recently tested a solution to this growing issue. "Unfortunately, this problem haunts almost all observatories today," Vlad Pashkovsky, StealthTransit's founder and CEO, told Space.com in an email. "Modern telescopes are highly sensitive and feel the impact of outdoor lighting of cities located at the distance of 50 or even 200 kilometers [30 to 120 miles]. This means that virtually every observatory on Earth either already needs, or will need in the future 10 years, protection from the light of large cities."

StealthTransit's solution relies on three components: A simple device that makes LED lights flicker at a very high frequency that is imperceptible to the human eye, a GPS receiver, and a specially designed shutter on the telescope's camera that can blink in sync with the LED lights. The GPS technology guides the telescope's shutter to open only during the fleeting moments when the LED lights are switched off. The experiments, conducted at an observatory in the Caucasus Mountains in Russia, showed that the technology, dubbed the DarkSkyProtector, could reduce unwanted sky glow in astronomical images by 94%. "We can say that the telescope was seeing almost a dark sky at this time," Pashkovsky said. "The important thing about our technology is that it makes all kinds of lights astronomy-friendly, including outdoor advertising and indoor lighting in apartments, offices and stores."

The technology could filter out lights from nearby towns and villages as well as those surrounding the observatory itself. It might sound impractical to refit an entire town with devices that allow lamps to blink, but Pashkovsky said that most existing LED lights can operate in the blinking mode and that new lamps designed specifically with sky protection in mind would be no costlier than existing LED technology. The most expensive element of the DarkSkyProtector system is the telescope shutter, which needs to be lightweight and agile enough to blink about 150 times per second. StealthTransit tested the prototype shutter on a 24-inch-wide (60 centimeters) telescope and hopes to make the technology available for larger telescopes. Although StealthTransit's technology is not yet ready for commercial use, Pashkovsky said, the firm hopes to have a product fit for the world's best telescopes in five to seven years.